


Point, Counter

by ParadifeLoft



Series: Giftmas 2013 [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Nargothrond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 03:13:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1101711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The host of the Feanorians has arrived in Nargothrond from the east after the devastating Dagor Bragollach. Nargothrond's court adjusts to these guests of debatable desirability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Point, Counter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lintamande](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lintamande/gifts).



> Happy Giftmas, Lintamande! I hope this interpretation of your request pleases :) Of course I'm quite transparent, playing my Curufin at every chance I'm able - not to mention I might have slightly interpreted "Feanorians" to mean "people in the Feanorian host" rather than just strictly the two brothers and the bbyTyelpe, because it suited my purposes a bit better - and I know you enjoy my OCs ;)
> 
> I hope you have a good holiday!

It had only been a simple question, as Gwindor had intended it. Had the lords of the House of Feanor known Orodreth at all before they had come west? He should have realised what time that would have invoked, before he'd spoken - King Finrod was one thing; but his nephew was quite another.

 _Not in particular_ , Orodreth had answered, instead of any of the three lords sitting opposite him - a thorough failure of what he'd intended as but making conversation over the meal they shared. Gwindor might have taken it back, suddenly, but it was the lack of finesse as such that had gotten him in such a situation; it was hardly about to get him out of it.

It was Celegorm then, almost surprisingly, who resuscitated the conversation, giving a slight bark of laughter. Gwindor could see the white shine of his teeth. "He was a bit young, compared to us back then," he said. "And besides, we had our own hands full!" A glance then, with a smile, shot over at the younger elf sitting beside his brother; dark curls and polite grey eyes  and red brocade over skin the same tone as Gwindor's. Celebrimbor; a craftsman like his father.

"But we got to know him later, of course!" Celegorm only continued, retaining if not widening the grin. "We saved him, you know. At Tol Sirion." As though the entirety of Nargothrond was not already aware of it. He straightened, tossing back another sip of his wine and angling his head toward Orodreth, just the way a bright-eyed hound would. The jewels strung in his dark hair rustled. Orodreth's face was unmoved; indeed, _prevented_ from moving, if Gwindor's estimate was correct. "He fought like a wolf."

A change in Finduilas's expression caught his eye then. Her sweet smile, he saw, aimed at these fell lords she claimed as her kin. "My lord tells me it was very gallant, too," she said to Celegorm. "He was among the garrison at the time - Lord Guilin his father has long supported the war in the north, you see."

Some game that she was playing, certainly - though the look Gwindor read from Orodreth seemed ambiguous, oddly, as to his opinion of such. But then, he had a certain suspicion that the king must have gone to unusual lengths, to arrange this meeting of two such disparate branches of his kin, even though Orodreth, he did at least know, was not the sort to complain and protest aloud. Not to any counsellors, in any case - Gwindor could not say what the man did when alone in his private chambers.

"Hm. _Gallant_ , perhaps, in a child's story," the other brother pronounced, with a flick of his eyes toward Finduilas and Gwindor himself, and then to Orodreth. His voice was quiet, careful, perhaps even soothing - Gwindor had never spoken, before, directly with Lord Curufin. He knew the man was called the likeness of Feanor's ghost still in the world, by some, though he'd never pictured Feanor to have such still grace. "Running with a train of civilians from one fight into another, each comparable in bloodiness, is not where I would place that word."

Could he say he disagreed with the assessment? He could not, no; for it was all the horror that Lord Curufin described. And yet he stood by his words, he could not now put his finger on why, that he had spoken to Finduilas -

But Faelivrin, clever as she was, did not trip on the barb. "My apologies," she answered him, with a fluid incline of her head, all matching grace. "I did not mean to make light of your people's suffering; simply to situate your actions with regards to my father and his soldiers amongst the rest of our songs."

Lord Curufin's gaze flicked to her, when she spoke, and lingered, considering, before skipping to rest briefly once again on Orodreth.

Near the close of the meal, Lord Celegorm asked whether Gwindor wished to go hunting with the eastern lords in a few days' time. Gwindor thought of Gelmir, dead before Himlad's army had even arrived. He thought of his father and mother. Of Finduilas. Of Orodreth. And he agreed.

Lord Curufin took Finduilas's hand, and spoke highly of the detailing of her pair of rings.

 

\----

 

When Curufin stepped into the chamber, unannounced, Orodreth had been discussing changes in troop requisitions with Lord Edrahil . He cut a halt in that conversation well, this son of Feanor: sleek black and silver and fine embroidery in red - both his robes, and his manner.

"My cousin instructed I should speak with you - as to the matter of arranging farming equipment and crafters' tools properly distributed to my people, now they are becoming settled,"Curufin said by way of greeting, with the same confident mildness that had already endeared the man to much of his uncle's council. Though Orodreth could hear its whisper of a sharp blade beneath a cloth nonetheless; and by the slight change in the set of Edrahil's jaw, the other man seemed able to as well.

Perhaps it was learning to walk about a court in Valinor, that made all the difference, Orodreth considered. Edrahil could manage to sting at these _guests_ with a coldness all inscribed about with polite words, as Orodreth found he could not - and with less guilt, surely.

"Are they unable to visit the marketplace and arrange for their own needs?" he asked, eyes grey and grey neither flinching from the other's. "That is customarily the manner, here…"

Curufin's mouth became a faint smile. "True, and I would not ask, were these ordinary circumstances. The numbers, simply, the sheer scale of the task, however; I fear it would prove overwhelming to your merchants and craftsmen, to be inundated suddenly with so many individuals' needs. It would be more efficient - and the king agrees - for me to place a single large order with your own help in the arrangement, and see to the distribution myself."

Edrahil's eyes held a touch of scorn; the tip of a large sheet of ice, surely, poking out between others it had come against in some shift, with its body hidden beneath the rest. "We do not deal, in Nargothrond, with such organisation as you must be accustomed to in the east, with autonomous pockets of our citizens under merely a single lord, and such fragmented and opaque authority."

"That is a luxury of peace, my lord, and if you will excuse me, Lord Curufin and his people have come just from war."

Two pairs of eyes both, turned to Orodreth before his words had finished, a surprise even to himself. Moreover, one that hovered uneasily above the pit of his stomach - but it was _true_ , was simply the fact, that to attempt what Lord Edrahil proposed was vastly inefficient, nothing he would have countenanced at Sirion, or -

Orodreth rubbed his thumb against his forefinger, and then curled all his fingers in against his palm. "It is not some threat to your authority, my lord. Merely a sensible method of dealing with this problem, and this problem alone." He thought he heard his voice twitch awkwardly, between sentences. He hoped it was merely his imagination.

Edrahil gave an inscrutable look that Orodreth doubted was anything pleasant. "Indeed. Let me fetch a quill, then."

 

\----

 

Lady Híthiel - a woman about her own age and notable as such among the eastern lords; not to mention some relation, if she recalled correctly, of the Lord Curufin - invited Finduilas to go riding with her, not a fortnight prior to the harvest festival celebrations.

"Call me Lëaras," she interrupted, when Finduilas expressed her gratitude - voice soft but arched, insistent, unaccustomed to having her wishes neglected. Similarly unaccustomed to the syllables of the name, that she spoke too precisely, lacking the practise that would wear them down like a stream over jagged rocks. Her olive cheeks were tinged with pink; her lips soft; her hair a long cord threaded together from surely a hundred tiny braids, dispersing into thin ringlets just below her shoulder blades. (Finduilas could guess better, now, since the arrival of the eastern host, who it was that the king her uncle dressed for.)

"I would be delighted", the princess answered her guest with a smile. She retained it astride her mare, trotting at a stately and ladylike pace, as they spoke of her likes and dislikes and whether it was a hardship for her, needing to herd so many cooks and artisans and harpists and tailors for her uncle's coming feast. "On the contrary; it is an honour of a responsibility," Finduilas answered, for perhaps the meats and candied fruits would taste the sweeter, the wine the headier, the dances with her uncle's courtiers and especially her betrothed the more dizzying, when she saw them the completion of her own hand; or so she could guess.

"Oh?" Lady Lëaras responded, just as arch as her brow, with a smile that shifted in barely a moment from mirror to Finduilas's own, to amusedly mischevious with a sudden glint in her eye. She adjusted her reigns, and straightened in her saddle.

They raced nearly the entire length of the king's southern wood, then; hardly a word's notice to give Finduilas any readiness - but even starting so inauspiciously as with a startled blink and a tug at her own reins, Finduilas ended the race nose to Lëaras's heels, cloak streaming behind her a shimmering wave of gold, green, and blue in the cloudless sun.


End file.
